Vatican Information Service gives a round-up of August action – very brief summaries of each Angelus and General Audience, accounts of meetings, letters sent and statements issued, and so on. A good thing to have – to make it even better they should add hyperlinks to the text of the summary, so that if the summary, say, of the August 9 General Audience intrigues you, you can just click on the link and go read the whole thing.

And, although things seem to be slowly improving under new management at the Vatican news services, I’d like some rich Catholic magnate to give a bunch of money to them to fund more translators (and not just in English, of course) – sometimes they’re timely, and sometimes it takes a while (understandable given the, er…legendary work ethic of the Curia), but in this day of instant communication, it’s essential that the Vatican at least attempt to take a strong arm in communicating its own message – The Pope said some quite interesting things at the meeting with priests last week, which we blogged about below, but so far, the only news stories have concerned his statements about St. Francis being a "playboy" and the novelty of Benedict’s use of the English word. The whole text has been on the website in Italian since the day after the talk, but there’s no reason – say, English, Spanish, French and German translations couldn’t be posted in short order. If Teresa at the Papa Ratzinger Forum can crank out a translation over the course of a couple of days in between all of her other responsibilities, surely a staff person in the Vatican could handle it within hours of the talk itself.

(And yes, the issue of "translation" at the Vatican is not as simple as just…translating (which is not simple, of course) – the issue comes with theological concerns as well. The translation must be accurate in all senses, and this might take a couple of levels of double-checking. But again…just do it.)

I also think the Vatican would do well to realize that the "ministry" of Communications is not just an endeavor centered on journalists any more. I understand the Vatican website is currently being overhauled and a very useful element of any new design would be a "What’s News" section, update daily, with links to new postings of translations of papal statements and other related newsworthy Curia-related events so folks from all over the world can blogroll their PopeBlog and check it daily…